Word: belaga
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Dusky Belaga, pop. 25,300, could be any quaint town in the American heartland. As the sun creeps down, joggers maunder the quiet streets. Old men in wifebeaters gossip and smoke over slow cups of coffee in a café right next door to a licensed ammunition dealer, across the street from a well-kept park with a picket fence. A few kids shoot hoops nearby at a shabby basketball court whose bent rims possibly never even had nets. Somewhere in the direction of the town's lone evangelical church, a weed-whacker hums...
...this is Sarawak, Malaysia - not Missouri. Belaga's Main Bazaar is a row of careworn early 20th century Chinese shophouses. Between the stores and the town's stone jetty stands a giant wooden hornbill, perched on a carved totem pole, missing a wing, paint peeling on its sun-bleached casque. From the kampung a couple of blocks away floats a muezzin's soulful maghrib, mingling in the twilight with the putter of Yamaha motors on the longboats crawling their way up the Batang Rajang, Malaysia's longest river. For hundreds of years, this was one of Sarawak's most vital...
Good luck finding either today. The pristine primary jungle is gone, an arboreal paradise logged, and both routes into Belaga, by boat or 4WD, show the ugly scars. Smoky 75-seat ekspress boats from Kuching spume up the Rajang (in 13 hours, spread over several legs and days), juddering past sawmills, plywood factories, rusty shipyards and timber barges heading downriver to the South China Sea. The alternative is a bumpy Land Rover ride from Bintulu, a coastal oil town three hours away, much of it on a rutted logging road past denuded ocher hills cleared to make way for palm...
...arrive by ekspress in Belaga on a sweltering Monday afternoon. The fellow passengers offer a fair representative slice of the Rajang's recent social history: an itinerant Malay dentist who'll pull that blackened molar for $3; Hokkien merchants whose families came from Singapore in the 1870s as traders, glued to the John Woo DVD playing onboard; and longhouse dwellers. Some of the latter are older, with distended earlobes and inked skin, but most are young couples returning from market hubs like Kapit, where Charles Brooke, the second White Rajah of Sarawak, built a fort (still standing...
Dayak customs are disappearing fast as younger generations leave longhouses for logging jobs or work in the cities, growing accustomed to the comforts of an industrialized world - you'll see a thousand gray Astro satellite dishes around Belaga before marking a wild hornbill along the turbid Rajang. I sip limeades with Calvin at a riverfront café on my last night in town. He points to a weathered chieftain's tomb on the opposite bank, a wooden blur amid ferns and rubber and durian trees. The family hasn't maintained it for years, and restoration is unlikely. It's getting...